White Lies (22 page)

He sort of smiles, eyes everywhere but my face. “Lydia and I were only together for a few months. Over thirty years ago now. It doesn’t really seem real, I suppose.”

He can’t have known about Alex. Jamie is insane. Lee’s a nice guy. He wouldn’t have run if he’d known he had a child. He’s looking after me and he’s only known me a few hours. I’ve had a longer conversation with him than I have had with my own father in the last five years.

“When did your brother die?” he asks softly, folding and unfolding the letter in his hands.

“My - ” I start to say half/step/non-brother then swallow it down. There is no need to be so pedantic. “About a month ago.”

Lee pulls on the handle of my chair so he can look at me straight. “This is the worst part,” he says quietly. “But then you’ll start feeling guilty for things getting easier. Then angry that people have stopped asking you about it, stopped wondering if you’re okay. You’ll think they’ve forgotten. But you’ll still think about it all the time. Give it a year. Actually, not spot on a year – that’s almost harder than this bit, the anniversary – but give it just over a year and you won’t feel so close to it all. It’s not going to go away, though. It just gets further away from where it hurts.”

But it doesn’t hurt. It’s just an emptiness. Grief I could work with. I don’t know what to do with this void.

“Are you married?” I ask him.

“No.”

“Kids?”

He hesitates. “No.”

“Oh.” The space between us is too quiet. “Do you remember Angela?” I ask.

His face brightens, “Oh, yes, of course. She was such a funny little thing. How is she?”

“She’s okay.”

He struggles to find the right word, masticates it around his tongue first. “I was… surprised that Lydia had another baby. After Angela. Having her… the birth nearly killed her, you know?”

I didn’t. I shake my head. “She had a caesarean with Alex. And blood transfusions after, I think.”

He nods. “Does your dad know? About me? The letter?”

“No.”

“Is he a good dad?” He’s asking questions he doesn’t want the answers to. It’s wounding him to ask them, but he’ll probably never see me again so he has to. And I realise that’s why he’s here: not to look after me but to salve his conscience.

“To Alex? Yeah. He was. Lydia was a good mum to both of us.” My fists clench around the scrappy edges of my jeans, holding them tight against my throbbing leg. Every time the automatic doors admit another waiting, bleeding, wheezing A&E patient, goose bumps ripple along my skin. Lee’s pale eyes, presumably capable of as much hatred as his son’s, peer at me, almost amused. A rush of protective love for Lydia floods me cold.
She chose the right father,
I want to say.

Fuck it, why not? “She chose the right father for Alex.”

He blinks, sits back, tucks the letter away inside his jacket. “You’re right there.”

I edge my wheelchair a few inches back. “You don’t have to wait with me.”

“It’s okay. I’ll see you to the doctor, anyway.”

“No, really - ”

I yank on the wheel to turn away and nearly tip myself out. The spirit level in my head explodes and I have to stuff the paper towel into my mouth to stop myself from being sick again. Instead of leaping away, Lee lays a warm hand on my back and rubs in slow circles. And I, stupidly, start to cry.

Lee sighs, not impatiently, just heavy with air. “I get the feeling you didn’t really get on with your brother,” he says.

I don’t need a pause, “I hated him.”

“So why are you so upset?”

“It was my fault.”

“Sounds like an accident to me.”

I know it does. But I know somehow it wasn’t.

A doctor comes through from the treatment rooms and swaps paperwork with a nurse behind the front desk. The waiting inhabitants of the room lean forward expectantly, hoping to hear their name called next.

Lee picks at a jagged thumbnail roughly, “I didn’t believe her when she told me. I thought it was just an excuse to make me stay. I was moving to Scotland for a new job and I thought she was just trying to manipulate me.”

“Matthew Landrow?” calls the doctor, hiding a yawn behind his clipboard.

“You
knew?
” I whisper.

Lee nods at the doctor, “That’s you.”

“Why didn’t you ever try to find him?”

Lee stands, waves at the doctor and wheels me over to the desk.

“To be honest, Matthew, Lydia was a liar. I didn’t want to know if it was true or not. It seemed easier that way.” He falters for a moment. “But now I have my karma, don’t I?” he pats his pocket where the letter lies.

“Matthew?” the doctor smiles with his mouth but not his eyes. He takes the wheelchair handles from Lee and spins me deftly about and away through the double doors and Lee doesn’t say goodbye.

#

I am taken to the underbelly of the hospital, an overflow ward containing what appears to be mostly moaning elderly people. No curtains have been drawn to divide us. After the doctor prods my head and pulls back the paper towel over my crotch without warning, he writes something on my clipboard and leaves again. The nurses at their station refuse to look up in case they make eye contact with someone. It is sweltering but my joints have seized in their sockets and I can’t take off my coat.

The man in the cubicle next to me sits on the edge of his bed holding a large paper bag and stares at me. “You here visitin’?” he asks, “Mum or Dad? They dyin’?”

“No… ” I say slowly, expecting the dried blood on my face and hands to explain for me.

“Check-up for me. And picking up my drugs,” he swings the bag at me and hoicks up his left trouser leg, revealing a bloated calf scabbed with black discs and criss-crossed with discoloured veins. “Blood clot,” he tells me proudly.

I nod, swallow more saliva than is comfortable. An old man shuffles a painstaking journey from his bed on the right side of the ward to the toilet on the left, drip-stand in tow. He doesn’t make it in time. Little pools of urine trail behind him and the stand’s wheels leave tracks as he drags them through.

A woman with thinning, greasy red hair makes her rounds from bed to bed. She’s not a nurse, clearly – her right eye is half-closed and weepy and she’s wearing a purple dressing gown and trainers – but the intent and manner is there. She squeezes blood clot man’s shoulders affectionately. “Alright, my darling?” she coos. Her accent is thick and throaty. Her eyes find mine and I try a smile.

“You visiting someone?” she asks. I shake my head, blushing beneath the sweat that gathers on my face under the unnatural heating of the ward.

She scurries around the bed and presses a palm against my forehead, yelling over to the nurse’s station, “He is rather hot. He is
very
hot!” then to me, “You’re burning up, my darling.” And I am. And maybe it’s not just the heating. The lump is still there.

The nurses ignore her and she moves onto the old peeing man, just inches away from the toilet door now, and goes to help him in. Finally the nurses move, waving the red-haired woman away and returning the old man to his bed. A porter comes to clean up the piss. A nurse glances at my chart as she passes and returns an hour later with a fucking terrifying curved needle and some catgut or whatever it is.

“You shouldn’t really be on this ward,” she mutters, as if it’s my fault I was brought here.

“Oh,” I say.

She shakes her head and when I see the pouches of tiredness beneath her eyes I realise it was meant to be an apology. “Busy afternoon.”

“Right.”

“Put your head forward.”

“Okay.”

She stitches up my head with an accompaniment of sighs and a wet cough that she vaguely tries to cover with her forearm. My swollen head throbs around the wound. My jaw aches from clenching. My phone buzzes in my jeans pocket, cut away and hanging over the side of the bed.

“No mobiles allowed in here,” she snaps as she cuts the last thread and pulls the knot tight. She smiles like it takes a lot of effort to do so. “I’ll try to get a doctor to sign your forms as soon as we can and you can go home.”

“Thanks.”

She pulls the curtain around my bed as she leaves and I attempt to quietly burst into tears. My phone goes again. It’s Sabine. I turn it to silent. Someone else is crying outside my cubicle, a gentle but heartbroken weeping that makes my self-pitying sobs impotent. I wonder if anyone is coming to visit the red-haired wannabe nurse or the pissing man or those blood-clotted legs or anyone else here. I wonder how the fuck Angela maintains any kind of positivity facing this lost battle every day. How Dad doesn’t just kill himself outright. I would. Except I wouldn’t have the guts. I wonder if it’s because of the concussion that I can’t remember where I parked the car.

Chapter Eighteen

It’s a hotel room. It’s a cell. It’s a waiting room. It’s my room. Not my room. Not my flat. Not the house. But mine. Temporarily. Connect the dots, you’ll get there eventually. Nightness outside. Darkling. A door between me and all the muttering staff people. Spots of blood on the knees of my pyjamas. Not my blood, so that’s okay then.

A window, unlatched. Ground floor. I could leave. But nowhere to go. No more doorways. All gone. I think I swallowed my voice.

Don’t ask, don’t recall

What happened to that damn fork?

No regret, all dark.

Maybe I can pull my voice back up my throat manually. I find the bathroom eventually. It’s not where it used to be in my flat - the door opens the wrong way and these are not my towels. Fingers as far back as I can stick them, stroking my epiglottis until bile and mashed vegetables splatter into the toilet bowl but there’s no voice to be dragged up. I try again, until nothing is left, until there is blood. Until the retching turns to barking - a flapping seal trapped behind my voice box. My throat is raw but the more I swallow the looser my tongue becomes.

I try softly at first: “My name is Peter Landrow.”

It works. A little bit louder. “I am seventy-four-years-old.”

It hurts. And I have nothing much else to say. Except sorry. Someone needs a sorry from me. More than one someone. I should find them.

My feet magnetise to the floor and I can only lift them an inch before gravity pulls the soles down again, so I slide instead of walk – ball, shuffle, change – the apology waltz.

The lights are on in the corridor and I pause at the threshold. Mother Whistler’s machines hum. I was told to stay in my room but that might have been months ago. I won’t go far. If I get lost they’ll find me. They always do.

Left, shuffle, tiptoe, stop. Paul’s room is empty, bed stripped. Not even the pictures of his family left behind. A sorry belongs to him, I think. A clipboard sits on his bedside table with an inventory checklist and a chewed up biro. I write five apologetic capital letters on the back of it but when I try to read it back it has turned into a scribbled bird’s nest. I’m sure he’ll know what I meant.

Right and a slide and a one, two, three, one, two, three, stop. Past my dead doorway to Ingrid’s. The smell of TCP and oranges. She’s busy hacking up a lung. I did not bring her a present or pudding so I pass her the newspaper from her chest of drawers.

“Sit,” she says. I fall into her chair. Good dog. It is safe in here.

Ingrid wheezes crossword clues at me in between spluttering spasms. She drags in air through bubbling lungs like a drowning woman.

She has a drip next to her bed now. It wobbles with every cough. She beats her knees with the newspaper and I catch the date. A week until Lydia died, twenty years ago. We put the dust of her into a little concrete box that sits in the gated cremation area at the top of the graveyard on the hill.

“You’re no help at all today,” Ingrid says. “Do I have to do all the work?”

“Sorry.”

“Thinking?”

Nod.

“Well go and do it somewhere else or say it out loud, for Chrissakes.”

My muteness falls away but the words still cause harm, “Lydia died - next week.”

“Wife?”

“Second.”

“What was it?”

“Cancer.”

“Ah. Yup. One in three, isn’t that what they say? Recently?”

“Long time.”

“Still bad. I still get heart pains on the day my mum went. Real pain. Real connection, still, after they’re gone. I believe that, anyway.”

Nod, nod. Cough, cough.

“You’d better bloody ache when I go,” she creaks, about to launch a fresh assault on her ribcage.

“It’ll be quieter.”

“Ha! I’ll miss you, you bugger.”

Respite. Just the beeping of old Mother Whistler’s monitors across the hall. Ingrid’s chest buzzes with fluid.

“She wasn’t ready,” I say quietly. I didn’t mean to say it. For a moment I wonder if I imagined it. Ingrid sits staring at the shoddy brown oil paint landscape that hangs above her dresser.

“None of us are ready. Those who say they are… Lying bastards,” she whispers.

“I hated her for it,” I say. Lydia convinced us all she’d be okay – no matter what the doctors said – and we wanted to believe her, so we did. Then she was gone and I was solely responsible for three other lives. So many decisions. All that cause and effect, like dominoes falling down. How could they leave me like that? All of them: Heather, Alice, Lydia. They must have known I’d fail. I don’t think I say any of that out loud but Ingrid’s face drops into a soft sadness.